art by @MrsCripple (ilusmmm) Optional Music Spoiler: Content Warnings Gore, Death, Self-Harm, Suicide It was the most familiarly unfamiliar place in the whole estate: the medical wing. Where they would stand, never sit, never tilt their head back and allow any of the cycling medics to tend to their wounds and ask them what was wrong. They never had to. Yet, every few days they would mull about on the outer edges of it. They would drag wounded allies, friends, lovers, closer than that, less than that, more confusing than that, through the halls and flop them onto the bed to be cared for. The amount of time they had spent in a room they have no need for dawned on them as the solution to some ironic riddle that only a pedant purist with an axe to grind would have come up with. Who needs a clinic, but never uses it? Why, the mage, of course! The floors didn’t creak, but they just shifted their weight ever so, going down a long list of cycling tics and movements to make them seem like anything but a lifeless fixture of the room. The sun cut through the windows, filtering down in a picture-perfect scene upon Ashenvarya and Harlow. They dabbed at his cuts, at his bruises, the scratches along his face and his neck and the bloody wells in his shoulders singed with magic. The thin scrapes had already started to scab over, visible just barely on his sun-kissed skin. Why do people pick at scabs? What is it about the raw sort of skin that begs to be peeled back by nails, by calloused fingertips, and exposed to the air once more? They’d made scabs before, on purpose. Practiced it. The slow way the blood starts to dry and put itself together was nothing more than a chore to direct. It wasn’t natural. Naturally, they wanted to crawl into their own flesh and wait for it to just close. Leaving no scars. No trace of anything at all. They’d never felt the urge. Even replicating it by force felt improper. The way a lonely child might throw themselves a name-day party and act surprised when they unwrap the present for themselves. Forcing it to itch. Letting themselves scratch. It all felt so futile. There was some comfort in the kitchen, at least, always something for them to put into place, or always another mug of hot cocoa to stew and drain down before pouring another. They never thought to bother with the machines Amir or Naaji had set up. What would they use it for? Sometimes they’d cook, or create a snack, holding the plate in their hands with no desire to touch it, waiting until they passed by someone to share it with. Oranges were in season. Did anyone care for those? The way the rind peeled away. Skin-like. Maybe they could split their ribs open, splayed out in a perfectly symmetrical circle of bone and viscera in the way each little orange slice begs to be plucked out? Elsewhere, they were transcribing a tome as they’d done every day, a perfectly mundane scholar with the most unusual eccentricity of constantly seeking answers to questions no one posed. No one posed to them there, at least. They had gotten exceptionally good at that. Going tight in the jaw, rolling their eyes around, making it clear as day they were thinking. Stretching it out with questions, all the while the scholar stands right up, walks over to a section they had no interest in prior, and pulls something out. They were so familiar with it. Not with the scent of the pages, that didn’t matter, nor the voices of their peers, that mattered even less, but exactly the way to tear through and find an answer to make someone else however many miles away look like they know what they’re talking about. Sometimes they do, and in that moment it feels like a genuine thing, to recall, but even then it all starts to feel irrational to explain once they stumble across the fact it was learned with another face. They weren’t the only one, of course. There were many more at any given time and place. It was never disorienting, to them, somehow, in spite of being four or more bodies, they could just perfectly tune in or tune out. A passive, constant awareness of things that they know would drive anyone else insane. The thought did occur to them that maybe they were already there. It was just like fuzzing in and out of focus, but between however many different views, different people, sometimes coming upon themselves in a room alone with the inexplicable urge to just pick themselves apart. They’d done it plenty before. When they were ‘young.’ Hanging up skin on a faux coat rack of branches, only growing out of the habit of pulling out every bone in their legs one by one when they had scared some elderly woodsman mostly to death when he came upon the sight of them. They did not feel real. Why would they? They might as well just be skin pulled across skin, layered in a way that’s very, very good at pretending. It had started to weave beneath the floorboards. A pit, their flesh, a comforting looking circular nest of bone and meat and viscera that extended deep down much further than a second story should ever allow. Somehow, completely sterile, completely alive, refusing to rot or bleed but desperate to settle itself into any place they’d like to call ‘home’ and allow them to close in and connect to find the closest thing to sleep that wasn’t temporary death. Or maybe it was the same as that. It was the part of the mysterious whole that scared them the most. That made it some kind of absolute riot that they had the gall to put on a pretty looking face and stand in the middle of the road, calling some mutated folk freakish and unappealing. They had no skeletons in the closet. They had flesh in the floorboards. Sometimes that flesh would break from them, and they’d be left to wonder what they had simply left behind, for someone else to discover, and suffer for. Or perhaps it had been taken from them. The moments bleed together. Blood drips from their nose onto the countertop. They were passive about it-- rattling around in their brain, in their nose, in all the tubes and passages that would bring air to anyone’s lungs. Flushing it with blood, because they can. Because it’s a button on the inside they can press, twisting up the large tubing where food would usually go, connected to a pouch they’ve shrunken into nothing, with only space enough for cocoa. The lingering thought in the back of their head that since they’ve never really opened up another person, maybe they just have the configuration wrong. Maybe, if they slot some organ into some slight different place, it’ll all lock together and they’ll realize some deep profound truth within themselves. Or maybe they’d die. If they could. It was when they were most curious about death, that they took the job. No-one wanted it, of course. The man had said it drove most folk crazy. To be the person in front of the cart, arriving unceremoniously and with quietly spoken condolences to take the corpses (mutilated or not) from weeping families or otherwise and wheel them over to the temples. Where they’d accept their pittance of regals, and watch the faint outlines of the Silent Sisters, preparing to take them into their care. Sometimes, they had found them pleasing on the eyes, even in death, and wondered for a moment if they would find it flattering or insulting if they took their face and lived on in their stead. They never did it. None of it bothered them: not the stench, the rot or disease, the way they looked peaceful, or sometimes horrified, or most of the time like they still had so much left to say. They were often envious that, rather than a swath of darkness, these people would know an afterlife, or even another life. The Great Staircase, the Valley of Life or Legends. All sorts. They wondered what those places were like. If they’d ever see any of them. One time, they considered stowing away with the corpses. Letting themselves be dragged up to the Silent Sisters: paling their skin, slowing their heartbeat to nothing at all, making their eyes sallow and milky. Picturing in their mind jumping up suddenly on the final table, grabbing the Sister by the coat and begging to know if she could tell any difference at all, between them, and the people she’d cared for. Understanding that she’d say nothing, and probably stab them. And that they’d deserve it. Once they had made their deliveries, they would always wait until after. Sometimes observing the Celates pass inside, to see to their duties of blessings and final rites once the Sisters had finished their tasks. Reconstructing in their mind, the furnaces they must have, or fire-pits, or however else they cremate those countless bodies in countless places. Knowing the small containers of ash held everything that remained of these very real people in a static pile. Knowing, as well, that they could never be that. They weren’t very proud of that fact at all.
